She remembers that the spare bedroom is right over the sitting room. The house is heated with stoves in the winter time. There is a register right through the floor of the spare bedroom and the ceiling of the sitting room. Not the kind of a register that comes from a twisted-around shaft in a house that uses furnace heat. But jest really a hole in the floor, with a cast-iron grating, to let the heat from the room below into the one above. She says she guesses two people that wasn't so very honourable might sneak into the house the back way, and up the back stairs, and into the spare bedroom, and lay down on their stummicks on the floor, being careful to make no noise, and both see and hear through that register. Which we done it. CHAPTER XXIV I could hear well enough, but at first I couldn't see any of them. But I gathered that Miss Lucy was standing up whilst she was talking, and moving around a bit now and then. I seen one of her sleeves, and then a wisp of her hair. Which was aggervating, fur I wanted to know what she was like. But her voice was so soft and quiet that you kind of knowed before you seen her how she orter look. "Prentiss McMakin came to me that day," she was saying, "with an appeal--I hardly know how to tell you." She broke off. "Go ahead, Lucy," says Colonel Tom's voice. "He was insulting," she said. "He had been drinking. He wanted me to--to--he appealed to me to run off with him. "I was furious--NATURALLY." Her voice changed as she said it enough so you could feel how furious Miss Lucy could get. She was like her brother Tom in some ways. "I ordered him out of the house. His answer to that was an offer to marry me. You can imagine that I was surprised as well as angry--I was perplexed. "'But I AM married!' I cried. The idea that any of my own people, or any one whom I had known at home, would think I wasn't married was too much for me to take in all at once. "'You THINK you are,' said Prentiss McMakin, with a smile. "In spite of myself my breath stopped. It was as if a chilly hand had taken hold of my heart. I mean, physically, I felt like that. "'I AM married,' I repeated, simply. "I suppose that McMakin had got the story of our wedding from YOU." She stopped a minute. The doctor's voice answered: "I suppose so," like he was a very tired man. "Anyhow," she went on, "he knew that we went first to Clarksville. He said: "'You think you are married, Lucy, but you are not.' "I wish you to understand that Prentiss McMakin did it all very, very well. That is my excuse. He acted well. There was something about him--I scarcely know how to put it. It sounds odd, but the truth is that Prentiss McMakin was always a more convincing sort of a person when he had been drinking a little than when he was sober. He lacked warmth--he lacked temperament. I suppose just the right amount put it into him. It put the devil into him, too, I reckon.